Kicking the Sky

A Novel

On a steamy summer day in 1977, Emanuel Jaques was shining shoes in downtown Toronto. Emanuel was lured away from his friends by a man who promised some easy money. Four days later the boys body was discovered. He had been brutally raped and murdered. Twelve-year-old Antonio and his best friends, Manny and Ricky, spend their days on their bikes exploring the labyrinth of laneways that link their Portuguese neighborhood to the rest of the city. But as the details of Emanuel's death expose Toronto's seedier underbelly, the boys are pulled into an adult world of danger and cruelty, secrets and lies much closer to home.

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I had mixed feelings about this book. While I admire De Sa's writing very much, I found the subject matter disturbing. I hope this is not the life that an average Portuguese boy experienced growing up in 1970s Toronto. De Sa expertly evokes that time period and details the difficulty of the immigrant experience. Toronto's close-knit Portuguese community is vivid and detailed. But in the end it's hard to believe that a family could go through as much as 12-year-old Antonio's did, and Antonio certainly grows up faster than he should. I didn't find it to be a page turner - in fact, I sort of dreaded what might happen next.